With development and popularization of smartphones, data traffic of mobile communications is steadily on the rise. Particularly, as people increasingly use applications, such as microblog, WeChat, Facebook, and Twitter, it becomes increasingly hard for conventional cellular communications to meet ever-increasing communication traffic required by people. According to statistics, in global mobile communications, approximately 70% data traffic is generated indoors. This shows that most broadband data traffic of people, such as that for video services, online games, microblog browsing, and WeChat, is generated in indoor environments. Therefore, it is particularly important to improve indoor signal coverage and indoor user experience for an indoor subscriber. In recent years, small cells have drawn wide attention in the communications industry. A small cell is a small-sized low-power base station, and can provide, based on existing 3G and 4G wireless standard protocols, wireless communications services for mobile terminals. Small cells are mainly deployed in public places such as shopping malls, offices, and coffee houses, or inside homes. The small cell can make up for an indoor coverage shortage of a macro cell, and avoid difficulties in site selection for the macro cell. In addition, compared with the macro cell, the small cell can perform transmission at lower power, and therefore, the small cell is more environmentally friendly.
In the prior art, a small cell acts as a small-sized based station with low power consumption to provide communications services for mobile subscribers. As shown in FIG. 1, the small cell is connected to a Mobility Management Entity (MME)/Serving Gateway (SGW) by using a small cell gateway, to connect to a core network. In addition, the small cell provides wireless communications services for terminals within coverage of the small cell. An S1 interface exists between a macro cell and the MME/SGW, and an X2 interface exists between macro cells. A macro cell is connected to the core network by using the MME/SGW, and provides wireless communications services for terminals within coverage of the macro cell.
However, in the prior art, no communications interface exists between small cells or between a small cell and a macro cell. Consequently, on one hand, a small cell cannot obtain related information such as a working frequency, a frequency band, and a neighboring cell list of a macro cell; on the other hand, the macro cell cannot obtain related information such as a working frequency, an operating environment, and communication performance of the small cell either. Therefore, it is inconvenient for an operator to perform configuration management, performance optimization, interference coordination management, and fault detection, and the like for a small cell.